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Greeneville History
Greeneville, TN History
One of the most interesting facts about Pigeon Forge is that it once belonged to North Carolina. The first settlers came in 1788. There was an iron forge that was built by Isaac Love in 1820. In 1830, the Historic Old Mill was built by his son. Passenger pigeons were also big here, a true symbol of the frontier lifestyle that represented Tennessee so well in the olden days and remains a lingering memory today.
One of the most interesting facts about Pigeon Forge is that it once belonged to North Carolina. The first settlers came in 1788. There was an iron forge that was built by Isaac Love in 1820. In 1830, the Historic Old Mill was built by his son. Passenger pigeons were also big here, a true symbol of the frontier lifestyle that represented Tennessee so well in the olden days and remains a lingering memory today.
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For centuries, the Cherokee used the valley where Pigeon Forge is now located as a hunting ground. A Cherokee footpath known as "Indian Gap Trail" crossed the Great Smokies from North Carolina and passed through the Pigeon Forge valley en route to its junction with Great Indian Warpath in modern Sevierville. (US-441 closely parallels this ancient trail, although it crests the mountains at Newfound Gap rather than Indian Gap). From Sevierville, Great Indian Warpath headed west toward the Overhill Cherokee towns along the Little Tennessee River.
Indian Gap Trail brought the first Europeans to the Pigeon Forge area in the early 18th century. Along with hunters and trappers from North Carolina, traders from Virginia passed through the valley before 1750. Some time after 1783, Colonel Samuel Wear became one of the first permanent white settlers in the Pigeon Forge area. A veteran of the American Revolution, Wear erected a stockade near the confluence of Walden Creek and Little Pigeon River (now Pigeon Forge City Park) in 1792. This "fort" provided a safe stopover for early pioneers in the Sevier County area. Wear later served as a member of the committee that drafted Tennessee's state constitution.
In 1785, the Cherokee signed the Treaty of Dumplin Creek, ceding much of what is now Sevier County to the United States. Among the first to take advantage of this was Robert Shields (1740–1802), who received a survey for a tract of land in the Pigeon Forge area from the Watauga Land Office in 1786. Shields, who was also a veteran of the Revolution, established a small fort along Middle Creek near what is now Dollywood. Shields' son later wrote that the fort was 100 feet (30 m) long and 16 feet (4.9 m) wide, with 12-foot (3.7 m) walls constructed with "heavy logs." The fort contained living quarters for six families, with a common kitchen at one end and a common living room at the other. As his family grew, Shields constructed separate houses for his children, one of which was purchased by Horatio Butler in 1797 and remained with his descendants until it was torn down in 1994.
Pigeon Forge was once part of North Carolina. Settlers first reached the area in 1788, when the area was governed by North Carolina. Mordecai Lewis was a Pigeon Forge pioneer who received a 151-acre land grant and built the area's first grist mill around 1790. Pigeon Forge was the site of an iron forge built in 1820 by Isaac Love. His son William built the Historic Old Mill in 1830. William Love was appointed postmaster and the first post office is located inside the mill. The community “Pigeon Forge” was born, named by Love after the passenger pigeons that would roost in the trees along the river during their southern migration and his father’s iron forge. The iron forge, which gave Pigeon Forge its name, was dismantled sometime before 1884. Some believe it was moved to Kentucky. A vertical saw operation took its place. Through the efforts of earlier residents, the five hundred pound hammer used in the forge was preserved. After the original forge was removed, the hammer was displayed, first, at Butler’s Home Market, then, Henry and Fannie Butler’s Forge Hammer Grill and later at Apple Tree Inn. The forge’s hammer continued to remain on display at the Apple Tree Inn for many years.
The first telephone was installed in Pigeon Forge in 1898. At this time, a group of houses had been built along the west bank of the Little Pigeon River across from the Old Mill and to the south. This ‘string’ of houses became known as ‘String Town’.
John Sevier Trotter becomes the second owner of the mill and iron forge and adds a saw mill to his operation. He mills the lumber for a new, narrow covered bridge known as Trotter’s Ford that crosses the Little Pigeon River by the mill. Seven bridges would be built throughout the county. In 1849 the mill (or forge tract) was purchased by Mr. John Sevier Trotter who sold it to Mr. John Marshall McMahan. Mr. McMahan sold one fourth of the mill interest to A. T. Householder in December of 1900. His transfer deed specifically mentioned a gristmill, sawmill, and a carding machine.
Between 1900 and 1930, change occurred slowly. Citizens experienced the extension of the telephone, the remodeling of the Old Mill, the advent of automobile and train transportation, and World War I. In this thirty year span also came another blacksmith shop, the construction of a steam-powered planing mill, more stores, a Baptist church, a new Methodist church, an elementary school, a cannery, and a power plant. Chairs and furniture were produced, and a bottling plant was opened. Citizens remodeled Shiloh Methodist Church and expanded Shiloh cemetery grounds, and they experienced an aeroplane exhibition on September 15, 1923. During these years, before a long ribbon of pavement spread through the community’s farmland, Pigeon Forge’s main highway was a dirt road that ran primarily along the river.
Business and professionals were beginning to arrive in Pigeon Forge in the early 1900s. Some of these include Quarrels Brothers Garage, Robertson’s Garage, Leonard Ogle’s Barber Shop, E.E. Conner and Mrs. J.M. Whaley’s dry goods/grocery store, Dr. Samuel Gibson’s medical practice, the Butler Brothers Company, Mr. Dave Householder’s feed and grain business, the Farmers Supply Stores, the Stott Brothers Store, Tebo Watson’s Barber Shop, and the Roberts Brothers Blacksmith Shop.
In 1952, the east side of the Parkway was paved for a two-way highway, and in 1956, workers began paving the west side. By this time, Pigeon Forge Pottery was fast becoming an important part of the Great Smoky Mountains vacationing community in Sevier County. The fifties and sixties brought in businesses such as Gus Ward and Glenn Beal’s Esso on Stringtown Road. Arlie Roberts had a Texaco station just south of the Old Mill Avenue; other businesses included Lamon’s Café, Sims’ Service Station, and Trotter Electric. Light House Drive-in was near the Pigeon Forge Shopping Center and across the Parkway sat such businesses as Pickel’s Grocery, Z Buda’s Drug Store, and Lee’s Restaurant. Two Newman brothers opened a fine new supermarket as small country stores and their peddlers were becoming history. The Norma Dan Motel, still in operation today, opened the weekend of July 4, 1958.
Source Credit: Pigeon Forge website, Wikipedia website, Pigeon Forge City website and Old Mill website.
Indian Gap Trail brought the first Europeans to the Pigeon Forge area in the early 18th century. Along with hunters and trappers from North Carolina, traders from Virginia passed through the valley before 1750. Some time after 1783, Colonel Samuel Wear became one of the first permanent white settlers in the Pigeon Forge area. A veteran of the American Revolution, Wear erected a stockade near the confluence of Walden Creek and Little Pigeon River (now Pigeon Forge City Park) in 1792. This "fort" provided a safe stopover for early pioneers in the Sevier County area. Wear later served as a member of the committee that drafted Tennessee's state constitution.
In 1785, the Cherokee signed the Treaty of Dumplin Creek, ceding much of what is now Sevier County to the United States. Among the first to take advantage of this was Robert Shields (1740–1802), who received a survey for a tract of land in the Pigeon Forge area from the Watauga Land Office in 1786. Shields, who was also a veteran of the Revolution, established a small fort along Middle Creek near what is now Dollywood. Shields' son later wrote that the fort was 100 feet (30 m) long and 16 feet (4.9 m) wide, with 12-foot (3.7 m) walls constructed with "heavy logs." The fort contained living quarters for six families, with a common kitchen at one end and a common living room at the other. As his family grew, Shields constructed separate houses for his children, one of which was purchased by Horatio Butler in 1797 and remained with his descendants until it was torn down in 1994.
Pigeon Forge was once part of North Carolina. Settlers first reached the area in 1788, when the area was governed by North Carolina. Mordecai Lewis was a Pigeon Forge pioneer who received a 151-acre land grant and built the area's first grist mill around 1790. Pigeon Forge was the site of an iron forge built in 1820 by Isaac Love. His son William built the Historic Old Mill in 1830. William Love was appointed postmaster and the first post office is located inside the mill. The community “Pigeon Forge” was born, named by Love after the passenger pigeons that would roost in the trees along the river during their southern migration and his father’s iron forge. The iron forge, which gave Pigeon Forge its name, was dismantled sometime before 1884. Some believe it was moved to Kentucky. A vertical saw operation took its place. Through the efforts of earlier residents, the five hundred pound hammer used in the forge was preserved. After the original forge was removed, the hammer was displayed, first, at Butler’s Home Market, then, Henry and Fannie Butler’s Forge Hammer Grill and later at Apple Tree Inn. The forge’s hammer continued to remain on display at the Apple Tree Inn for many years.
The first telephone was installed in Pigeon Forge in 1898. At this time, a group of houses had been built along the west bank of the Little Pigeon River across from the Old Mill and to the south. This ‘string’ of houses became known as ‘String Town’.
John Sevier Trotter becomes the second owner of the mill and iron forge and adds a saw mill to his operation. He mills the lumber for a new, narrow covered bridge known as Trotter’s Ford that crosses the Little Pigeon River by the mill. Seven bridges would be built throughout the county. In 1849 the mill (or forge tract) was purchased by Mr. John Sevier Trotter who sold it to Mr. John Marshall McMahan. Mr. McMahan sold one fourth of the mill interest to A. T. Householder in December of 1900. His transfer deed specifically mentioned a gristmill, sawmill, and a carding machine.
Between 1900 and 1930, change occurred slowly. Citizens experienced the extension of the telephone, the remodeling of the Old Mill, the advent of automobile and train transportation, and World War I. In this thirty year span also came another blacksmith shop, the construction of a steam-powered planing mill, more stores, a Baptist church, a new Methodist church, an elementary school, a cannery, and a power plant. Chairs and furniture were produced, and a bottling plant was opened. Citizens remodeled Shiloh Methodist Church and expanded Shiloh cemetery grounds, and they experienced an aeroplane exhibition on September 15, 1923. During these years, before a long ribbon of pavement spread through the community’s farmland, Pigeon Forge’s main highway was a dirt road that ran primarily along the river.
Business and professionals were beginning to arrive in Pigeon Forge in the early 1900s. Some of these include Quarrels Brothers Garage, Robertson’s Garage, Leonard Ogle’s Barber Shop, E.E. Conner and Mrs. J.M. Whaley’s dry goods/grocery store, Dr. Samuel Gibson’s medical practice, the Butler Brothers Company, Mr. Dave Householder’s feed and grain business, the Farmers Supply Stores, the Stott Brothers Store, Tebo Watson’s Barber Shop, and the Roberts Brothers Blacksmith Shop.
In 1952, the east side of the Parkway was paved for a two-way highway, and in 1956, workers began paving the west side. By this time, Pigeon Forge Pottery was fast becoming an important part of the Great Smoky Mountains vacationing community in Sevier County. The fifties and sixties brought in businesses such as Gus Ward and Glenn Beal’s Esso on Stringtown Road. Arlie Roberts had a Texaco station just south of the Old Mill Avenue; other businesses included Lamon’s Café, Sims’ Service Station, and Trotter Electric. Light House Drive-in was near the Pigeon Forge Shopping Center and across the Parkway sat such businesses as Pickel’s Grocery, Z Buda’s Drug Store, and Lee’s Restaurant. Two Newman brothers opened a fine new supermarket as small country stores and their peddlers were becoming history. The Norma Dan Motel, still in operation today, opened the weekend of July 4, 1958.
Source Credit: Pigeon Forge website, Wikipedia website, Pigeon Forge City website and Old Mill website.
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Dollywood is a theme park founded in Pigeon Forge by Tennessee singer-songwriter Dolly Parton to enhance the economy of her native Sevier County. As the jaunty pun of the name implies, Dollywood involves the endless layerings and juxtapositions of traditional mountain culture and glitzy commercial appeal which are the twin hearts of Parton's own public persona. Dollywood is as purringly profit-oriented as any successful American theme park, the business of which is to conflate having fun with spending money, but it has an emotional core like no other. All involved in the enterprise understand what Dollywood has done for local prosperity, and even the most urbane of the park's components are suffused with the Tennessee hillbilly's point of view. Glittering Dollywood Boulevard, touted as a tribute to classic movies and film stars, also touchingly expresses what movies meant to people living in isolated Appalachia. While the hillbilly mystique is present and even celebrated in attractions as diverse as old-time soap-making and high-tech simulations of the white lightening chase in Thunder Road, depictions of the gullible hillbilly and his suspicious gun-toting cousin are emphatically excluded.
One reason Dollywood is now among the most visited parks in America is because it offers safe, controlled proximity to a southern hillbilly culture which has simultaneously intrigued and alienated Americans for over a century.
Dollywood's origins devolve from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial exploitation of the mountain South. In 1961 the Robbins family rebuilt a narrow-gauge railway and locomotive which a logging company had abandoned after the federal government established the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Adding passenger cars to the train and a general store, saloon, and blacksmith shop to its point of departure and arrival, the Robbinses established Rebel Railroad. The special appeal of each train ride was the “possibility” that Federal troops might spring from the underbrush, board the train, and steal a strongbox full of Confederate money. Promotions encouraged children to bring weapons and help fight off marauding Yankees.
Investment-minded managers of the Cleveland Browns bought this languishing business in 1970 and refashioned it into Goldrush Junction, an amusement park with an Old West theme, which featured, in addition to the train and its existing accouterments, a woodworking shop, sawmill, outdoor theater, and log cabins. Seven years later Herschend Enterprises bought the facility and renamed it Silver Dollar City. The park now emphasized old-time southern means of production, in support of which the new owners built and staffed a water-driven gristmill and a carriage-making shop. Other craft workshops followed. By 1980 the popularity of this handicraft theme was faltering, so the owners added amusement rides with dangerous-sounding names like Tennessee Twister, Blazing Fury, and Flooded Mine.
In the early 1980s Dolly Parton began to consider establishing her own theme park in Pigeon Forge. By 1985 she had arranged a partnership with the Herschends and reached an agreement that she would invest several million dollars to enlarge, elaborate, and rename Silver Dollar City. Parton maintained the facility's decades-long strategy of accretion as well as reinvention; all existing operations remained in place, although most were refurbished and received new names–the old Rebel Railroad, for example, became the Dollywood Express. Nevertheless, park planners reorganized the site into zones with contrasting designations and themes. They also added an entirely new complex of shops and amusements focused around a whitewater ride called Smoky Mountain Rampage and the Back Porch Theater, where Parton's relatives performed in regular musical shows. These improvements, in addition to a more scrubbed-up, service-oriented style of visitor reception, required Silver Dollar City's three hundred employees to make room for five hundred more by the date of Dollywood's 1986 grand opening.
Almost every year since, Dollywood has expanded to encompass a new zone of amusement with a distinctive name and theme shared in some way by its entire constellation of novel attractions. The park now encompasses over 125 acres and welcomes millions of visitors each year. In combination with the tourist attractions, restaurants, and motels which have sprouted beyond its gates, Dollywood also makes Pigeon Forge the most formidable source of revenue in Sevier County.
Parton's music and her spirit pervade Dollywood, but she is explicitly present in three locations: the Rags to Riches Museum contains chronologically arranged memorabilia from different phases of her life; the replica of her two-room childhood home offers visitors an impossibly tidy and charming depiction of the Partons' life on Locust Ridge; and the Heartsongs multimedia show romantically evokes the origins of her music in the natural beauty of the mountains. Parton has cheerfully acknowledged the artifice in these and many other park presentations, but her particular conviction about memory–that good ones should be treasured and bad ones forgotten–subtly justifies the relentlessly positive tone and commercial polish of a park where so many of the diversions play off the traditional lifeways of a people whose lot involved exhausting work and few material rewards. A similar resolution is implicit in the park's mission statement: “Create Memories Worth Repeating.” The implication is that an energetic and consumption-oriented experience shared with family or friends can instantly generate joyous and relivable memories minus the monotony, adversity, and loss which are their inevitable context. If such a thing were indeed possible, it would happen at Dollywood.
Source Credit: TN Encyclopedia (Camille Wells) website,
One reason Dollywood is now among the most visited parks in America is because it offers safe, controlled proximity to a southern hillbilly culture which has simultaneously intrigued and alienated Americans for over a century.
Dollywood's origins devolve from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial exploitation of the mountain South. In 1961 the Robbins family rebuilt a narrow-gauge railway and locomotive which a logging company had abandoned after the federal government established the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Adding passenger cars to the train and a general store, saloon, and blacksmith shop to its point of departure and arrival, the Robbinses established Rebel Railroad. The special appeal of each train ride was the “possibility” that Federal troops might spring from the underbrush, board the train, and steal a strongbox full of Confederate money. Promotions encouraged children to bring weapons and help fight off marauding Yankees.
Investment-minded managers of the Cleveland Browns bought this languishing business in 1970 and refashioned it into Goldrush Junction, an amusement park with an Old West theme, which featured, in addition to the train and its existing accouterments, a woodworking shop, sawmill, outdoor theater, and log cabins. Seven years later Herschend Enterprises bought the facility and renamed it Silver Dollar City. The park now emphasized old-time southern means of production, in support of which the new owners built and staffed a water-driven gristmill and a carriage-making shop. Other craft workshops followed. By 1980 the popularity of this handicraft theme was faltering, so the owners added amusement rides with dangerous-sounding names like Tennessee Twister, Blazing Fury, and Flooded Mine.
In the early 1980s Dolly Parton began to consider establishing her own theme park in Pigeon Forge. By 1985 she had arranged a partnership with the Herschends and reached an agreement that she would invest several million dollars to enlarge, elaborate, and rename Silver Dollar City. Parton maintained the facility's decades-long strategy of accretion as well as reinvention; all existing operations remained in place, although most were refurbished and received new names–the old Rebel Railroad, for example, became the Dollywood Express. Nevertheless, park planners reorganized the site into zones with contrasting designations and themes. They also added an entirely new complex of shops and amusements focused around a whitewater ride called Smoky Mountain Rampage and the Back Porch Theater, where Parton's relatives performed in regular musical shows. These improvements, in addition to a more scrubbed-up, service-oriented style of visitor reception, required Silver Dollar City's three hundred employees to make room for five hundred more by the date of Dollywood's 1986 grand opening.
Almost every year since, Dollywood has expanded to encompass a new zone of amusement with a distinctive name and theme shared in some way by its entire constellation of novel attractions. The park now encompasses over 125 acres and welcomes millions of visitors each year. In combination with the tourist attractions, restaurants, and motels which have sprouted beyond its gates, Dollywood also makes Pigeon Forge the most formidable source of revenue in Sevier County.
Parton's music and her spirit pervade Dollywood, but she is explicitly present in three locations: the Rags to Riches Museum contains chronologically arranged memorabilia from different phases of her life; the replica of her two-room childhood home offers visitors an impossibly tidy and charming depiction of the Partons' life on Locust Ridge; and the Heartsongs multimedia show romantically evokes the origins of her music in the natural beauty of the mountains. Parton has cheerfully acknowledged the artifice in these and many other park presentations, but her particular conviction about memory–that good ones should be treasured and bad ones forgotten–subtly justifies the relentlessly positive tone and commercial polish of a park where so many of the diversions play off the traditional lifeways of a people whose lot involved exhausting work and few material rewards. A similar resolution is implicit in the park's mission statement: “Create Memories Worth Repeating.” The implication is that an energetic and consumption-oriented experience shared with family or friends can instantly generate joyous and relivable memories minus the monotony, adversity, and loss which are their inevitable context. If such a thing were indeed possible, it would happen at Dollywood.
Source Credit: TN Encyclopedia (Camille Wells) website,
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